Chapters and Kobo are kissing cousins--separate companies with Chapters owning 58% of Kobo. The ebook links on the Chapters site take you to Kobobook.com. People need an account there to buy a book from Kobo--the chapters account login will not work.

Kobo will work with PDF and ePUB books purchased from a wide variety of sources. They must either be non-DRM or the standard Adobe DRM (ADE). You can sideload from Calibre without a Kobo account as long as the format is correct.

As an alternative to sideloading, either through Calibre or Adobe, you can sync books bought through Kobobooks. The synced books use a proprietary Kobo DRM. Books added to the reader this way will sync across multiple devices, work with the dictionary (currently WiFi Kobo only), and use the website "I'm Reading" list to do things like keep track of bookmarks across devices.

Thanks to taming and MikeLC for your replies. I am also considering a Nook and if I go that way, I am thinking that I can download books from anywhere to my PC and then transfer them via Calibre to the ereader ( Nook or Kobo ) so I don't really have to have anything to do with Barnes & Noble in the USA. I could buy bopoks from Chapters and transfer them to the Nook or the Kobo. Also I could borrow ePub books from the library and transfer them to my Nook or Kobo in the same way. If those assumptions are correct , either ereader is in the running, isn't it?

The only pitfall I can see is if the Nook packs it in, I have to return it to the USA for repairs and am not sure if the warranty spans the border to Canada. On the other hand the Kobo is fully supported in Canada.

What I like about the Nook over the Kobo is the ability to play MP3's while reading.